Introduction

The SPARX source installer installs SPARX, EMAN2 and the SPARX gui, along with all third-party programs they require. Everything is put into a user-chosen directory; the installer does NOT require administrator (root) privileges, does not touch anything outside that directory, and it does not interfere with other installed libraries.

The list of third-party programs included is found here. The third-party programs are all open source/free software released under various licences.

The idea behind the installer is that third-party programs are updated infrequently, while SPARX / EMAN2 are updated frequently. The first time the source installer is used, all packages are compiled, which can take several hours. Updating SPARX / EMAN2 from this first installation takes much less time, typically minutes.

Instructions for the first (full) installation are found below, followed by instructions for updating SPARX/EMAN2 .

Platform Notes

linux

sparx is developed on various linux systems, and the installer should work on these:

Fedora Core 5/6

Mandriva 2006/2007

SuSE 10.1

Centos 4.2

Debian (testing/unstable)

Fedora Core 4 has some problems with EMAN2. There are many unit test failures, so Fedora Core 4 is not recommended as a platform for sparx/eman2.

macos x

The macos port is incomplete.

windows

The windows port is incomplete.

Overview

The SPARX installer lives in a single subdirectory chosen by the user; in the following instructions, this is /your/installer/path. In this directory, all needed packages are built.

The packages are "installed" under a second user-chosen directory, here named /your/sparxroot.

The installer does NOT touch anything outside those two directories, and it does not interfere with other installed libraries. It only uses basic system libraries, so it should work on any Linux system. If it fails to build, let me (mhhohn@lbl.gov) know.

Requirements

The installer checks for required packages when it is run and reports missing ones. For reference, the currently needed packages include:

gnu make

a C/C++ compiler

the subversion revision control system (command svn)

For full installation including the graphical parts, you must also have

an X installation including header files

Installation from source

This takes substantially longer than a binary installation but

it is fully compatible with your system

you can make additions to the installer itself if you need more packages (and send the additions back to make them permanent in the installer).

updating packages is straightforward. As sparx changes heavily, this is critical.

First:

mkdir /your/installer/path
cd /your/installer/path

Then, preferably:

svn co svn://cci.lbl.gov/sparx-installer/trunk \
sparx-installer

If you do not have subversion, and don't mind reinstalling everything occasionally, you can instead use this: